


This Is You

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [305]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Feelings, First Kiss, First Time, In Which Things Go Differently On the Shores of the Potomac, M/M, Memories, Recovery, Schmoop, first time in a long time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-10-01 21:38:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20413213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: What are you supposed to do when your memory becomes history? There’s a difference.





	This Is You

**Author's Note:**

> Prompts: Don't let the photograph replace the memory and National Park. Prompts from this [generator](https://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator).

What are you supposed to do when your memory becomes history? There’s a difference.

It’s not as though Steve’s ever forgotten that day, all those goddamn years ago: the smell of the sunshine, the heady crush of the leaves, the way Bucky’s grin never faded, not once, the whole day. He remembers what shirt he was wearing, which sweater vest; he remembers the crushed box that served as their picnic basket upending in the car and sending sandwiches and bottles of beer all over the backseat. And he remembers the girls who took their picture, a couple of blondes up from the city like them, their skin flushed from the fresh hair and the bottoms of their skirts stained green by the last of summer’s grass.

“Hey,” the one had said, the Brownie camera steady in her hands. “Smile!”

What the picture hadn’t captured was what had happened a few minutes before: shouted laugher that had turned into a tussle in the dirt and then...

And then--

The end of a friendship and the beginning of something else. A shifting of the solid ground that had always lain between them into quicksand, uncertainty, a new kind of vulnerability. You can’t see that in the frame.

He doesn’t see the picture until years later. Decades, in fact. But when he does, he realizes how little he’s wanted to remember. The image brings it all back.

“Holy shit,” Sam said, staring over his shoulder as the helicarriers burn overhead. “Is that you, Cap?”

The man who is Bucky is sitting on the ground between them, looking as wet and battered as Steve feels, but there’s a light in his face that wasn’t there before, bruises and broken bones be damned. The photo came from his pocket. When they’d found themselves beached, before either could muster the strength to put up a punch, he’d pulled it from some inner pocket in his armor and shoved it into Steve’s hands. Said:

“This is you, isn’t it?”

He has the same answer for Sam as he’d given Buck.

“Yeah. That’s me.”

“Well, what the hell was he doing with it?”

“Tch,” Bucky says. “I have it because it's mine.”

*****

They hole up at a safehouse Nat knows about way out in the wilds of nowhere. Steve’s pretty sure it’s one of hers, but she will neither confirm nor deny.

“There’s a well,” she says, giving them a perfunctory tour as they limp towards the front door. “Solar panels shielded from satellites. Food. We’ll be fine.”

She’s wary of the Winter Soldier. Steve doesn’t blame her. But she puts as much care into stitching him up as she does Steve, Sam standing in the corner the whole time, semi-glowering at them both.

“I don’t care how many broken ribs he has,” he says. “Come on, y’all. He’s a killing machine.”

Nat shoots him a look that’s more broadsword than dagger. “You’re seriously not helping.”

“I’m trying to be the voice of reason here, is what I’m doing. Steve, I get that this guy was your friend, but--”

“But nothing.” Steve’s voice feels like a scab. Damn it, everything hurts. “He’s Bucky. He stays or I go.”

“We’ve had this argument, gentlemen,” Nat snaps. There’s a prick in Steve’s arm, something cool and weird in his blood. “And we’re here, so we’re not having it again. Wilson, take your shit outside and see if you can get that pump running, huh? I don’t want to hear another fucking word about it.”

“Свирепый,” Bucky murmurs. “A red tiger, eh?”

Nat stands up between them, their two cots side by side. “Sleep, идиоты. Both of you. Or else I’ll snap something that’s still in one piece, ok?”

When he wakes up, it’s dark and the room is quiet, the air still. He can hear Bucky breathing.

It’s been a long time since they slept in the same room. They had when they were kids, on and off, camping out at one another’s houses, and they’d always shared the single bedroom in their apartment. But after that trip to the lake in that beat-up, borrowed Ford, it’d been different.

Awkward, at first. Neither of them had really know what that kiss meant. Steve sure as hell hadn’t. He knew what he wanted it to mean, but that wasn’t the same thing. And frankly, he hadn’t wanted to ask. 

The drive back was quiet, that first hour back in their apartment even more so. Bucky had fussed about setting out supper, like he always did, and Steve had taken refuge in the bathtub, ducking his face under the lukewarm water, reluctant to scrub the smell of the pine needles away. He got a little stiff despite the chill, much to his chagrin. Got out and put on a clean undershirt and ignored it.

“Made you a sandwich,” Bucky’d said from behind the newspaper when he padded into the kitchen. “There’s coffee. Any hot water left?”

It wasn’t until Steve had done the dishes and Bucky was finished splashing that it came to a head again: Bucky emerging in a cloud of steam and aftershave, his hands curving around the jut of Steve’s hips.

“I’m looking for my book,” Steve had said, strangled.

He’d felt Bucky’s mouth brush the back of his neck. “You left it in the car.”

“Oh.”

A gentle catch of sharp teeth. “Want me to put some pants on and go get it?”

“No,” Steve had whispered, remembers saying as if were only yesterday. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

Laying in that safehouse all those years later, he remembers waking up in the small hours and being startled that Bucky was in his bed, that his best friend was spooned around him like a barricade, his skin warm and smelling like sex. He remembers that he made a sound, he must have, because even in sleep, Bucky had tugged him close again, sighing, murmuring something senseless in his hair.

There’s a tear on his cheek, a dozen, and he shoves them away, turns his face into the pillow. God, what he wouldn’t give for Bucky, even this hollowed out Bucky, to do that right now.

“That picture,” Bucky says rough in the darkness. “I stole it a long time ago.”

It takes Steve a moment to understand what he means. “Stole it? From where?”

“From your, eh, what is it called? National Archives.”

If Steve’s head was clear, he might question that. Right now, though, selfishly, he can’t. “Why’d you take it? Did they make you?”

“No.” There’s a pause. “I was sent for something else. They didn’t know I had this, that I took it. I found...it was hard to lie to them. But I found ways.”

“Why, then?”

He can sense Bucky’s head turning towards him. There are crickets in the shadows outside. “I saw it and I knew myself. That was the first reason. But also--there was you. There was me and there was you.”

There’s a pang in Steve’s heart, a different kind of pain. “You recognized me?”

“Not recognized, exactly. I did not know your name. Though I was sure, the first time I saw it, that I knew you.” A dry cough, a wince that Steve can here. “Only today do the pieces fit together. But I still cannot understand the picture they make.”

Steve’s face is wet again and the hope, oh the stupid fucking hope, at the back of his throat is champagne, fierce and bitter. “Well,” he says, “that’s a start, I guess. There’s me, now, and there’s you.”

*****

It takes months for Bucky to be able to think clearly, longer for Stark to figure out how to divest him of the HYDRA arm and give him what Tony calls a shiny, unfucked-up, non-killy version instead.

Time, suddenly, is something they have.

The team drifts back together, as it always does, inevitably. At the compound, secrets come out: what Bucky did, that some arms of HYDRA still live, that there are parts of the universe beyond the Earth and the moon that are bent on destruction. There are fights and occasional histrionics but in the end, the Avengers stick together. It’s all good, in the end. Gives Bucky the time he needs to heal.

The photo sits beside Bucky’s bed in a little wooden frame. They don’t talk about it, which is fine. It takes a while to remember how to be each other’s friend again.

One night, though, at dinner, Barton passes Steve a textbook cracked open to page 181. 

“Will you look at that shit,” he says through a mouthful of taco. “My kid brought it home from school yesterday. You’re ancient history, Cap.”

_ Above _ , the caption says, in tiny block letters. _ Steve Rogers pre-Super Soldier serum, with James Barnes (1938)_.

“Hey,” Sam says, frowning over the edge of the page, “isn’t that--?”

Bucky isn’t at the table. He never eats with the crew; too many people, too much noise, he says. But Steve knows where he’ll be, where he is: in his room.

He’s smoking when Steve crashes in, leaning against the balcony in a cloud. There’s a half-finished tray on the coffee table and a book turned upside down beside it. He looks startled.

“What the hell, Steve? Since when don’t you knock?”

“Buck,” Steve says, shoving the textbook towards him. “Look. We’re history.”

Bucky whistles softly. His fingers drift up and brush the page, the washed-out image of them, of that day, the best day. A day that changed both their lives. “We’ve never been history, kid,” he says, rough. “But we never did get much here and now, did we?”

“No. I guess we didn’t.”

Then there’s no book in his hands and Bucky is smiling at him, sweet and sad. “What’d you think?”

“About what?”

Metal fingers on his cheek, cool against the heat. “Want to risk it and try again?”

They answer the call of the now in Bucky’s bed this time. They learn the changes in each other’s bodies and discover what’s the same and Steve remembers the joy of having Bucky loom over him, loving, cock buried inside and hips moving, churning, urging Steve towards the ecstasy of the other side, the side that time can’t touch, the side where memories never fade, the side where they once built things that even death couldn’t destroy and when Steve comes--the first time, the fourth, the fifth--it’s as if they’ve lived forever as the boys they were that summer day.

“You’re never leaving this bed again,” Bucky says when their bodies are still, when the world outside is, the small hours between dusk and dawn.

He reaches back and pinches Bucky’s thigh, snickers when he squawks. “I’m not, huh?”

“No. I’ve decided. You’re staying right here until I say otherwise.”

“I’d forgotten how territorial you can be.”

A flick of tongue against his ear. “Not territorial. Greedy. Head over heels in love with you. There’s a difference.”

It should be startling to hear him say it like that, almost casual: _ in love with you_. It’s more like, though, coming home.

“You’re gonna have to let me up eventually.”

“Who says?”

“Me.” Steve lifts metal fingers to his mouth, kisses them. “And like or not, Buck, I’m bigger than you.”

Bucky laughs. “Well shit. That sounded almost like a challenge, Stevie.”

“Almost? Bullshit. It is.”

This time, all these years later, their tussle ends not in a kiss but with Steve coming over Bucky’s fist and Bucky creaming Steve’s ass and with them clutching each other and saying things, feeling things, that they never could have back then.

And when Steve falls asleep, finally, it’s with his eyes on that long-ago afternoon, framed at Bucky’s bedside. A memory, yes, he thinks, leaning back in Bucky’s arms, but not history, no. A beginning.


End file.
